And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

  * * *

  After the flames, smoke, and dust partially cleared, Hamzi watched the six men shove a final round of shaped incendiary phosphorus charges into the vast, deep, fire-flickering holes. These last blasts would do it.

  Dry-cask security depended on two faulty assumptions: that the terrorists would not destroy dry casks en masse, and that they would not, at the end of the attack, hammer the shattered casks with shaped incendiary charges. Hamzi and his men had proved those assumptions wrong. Now Hamzi could see the fuel assemblies were laid bare, their exposed rods blindingly ablaze.

  10

  “Fire in the hole!”

  —Elias Edito

  At the moment, Elias had his hands full. While coordinating the major explosions, he also had to keep an eye out for approaching military units, state trooper vehicles, or intrusive plant guards. The last duty was important. Someone had hit an alarm, and consequently, he’d spent the last half hour taking out approaching guards with his silenced M110 7.62mm assault rifle. Between the noise and flash suppressors, the men he killed didn’t even know what hit them. There was nothing to see or hear. Furthermore, he’d taken them all out with head shots, which had frightened the surviving guards even more. Their comrades dropped dead as doornails right in front of them, and they couldn’t tell where the rounds were coming from.

  Still the plant security kept coming. Even now a half dozen security personnel with assault rifles were rounding the corner of the Visitors Center and quick-jogging past it toward the Auxiliary Building.

  Elias had walked that pathway two weeks earlier with a pedometer and written down the precise distance of each visible landmark along the way, so he had the opposition bracketed. When the men reached the edge of the Auxiliary Building, they would be 175 yards away.

  Elias raised the 7.62. Contrary to much rumor and disbelief, noise suppressors have virtually no effect on the weapon’s accuracy, and he had already locked the KAC noise suppressor’s yoke onto the barrel’s gas block. Adjusting the Leupold 3.5-10×30mm Sniper Scope to 175 yards, Elias rounded the catwalk. He now faced the roadway—Main Street, as it was known in the plant. Kneeling on the catwalk, he wrapped the shoulder strap around his arm and rested the barrel in the bottom rail groove, which he’d cut with a crosscut file earlier in his shift. He sighted in on the piece of roadway aligned with the Auxiliary Building’s far edge.

  Since it was only prudent to assume they wore vests, he aimed for their heads. First number one, then two, three, four, and five went down. Number six, however, had begun running in S curves, and Elias missed him. Aiming at his thighs, he shot his right leg out from under him. The man fell, screaming, sprawled on his side, clutching his shattered femur. Elias had a clear shot at the back of his head. A 7.62 coup de grace to his nape ended his howls.

  Elias turned to look at the Auxiliary Building, Reactor Containment Building, nuclear waste storage sheds, and dry fuel silos. The men had done well. Smoke was pouring out the buildings’ windows and doors; the spent fuel pools and the dry casks were ferociously ablaze.

  Hamzi and Fahad were a hundred or so feet away from the Auxiliary and Reactor Containment Buildings. They had both wired and wireless detonators. Elias inserted his earplugs, turned on his sleeve microphone, and shouted:

  “Bismillah!” In the name of Allah, let us begin. Followed by, “Alhamdulillah w Ashokrulillah!” Praise be to Allah for granting us these gifts. Then Elias screamed in English, “Fire in the hole!”

  At which point Hamzi and Fahad hit all four detonators.

  The reactor containment dome muffled the control room blasts, but the Auxiliary Building shook with multiple detonations, which coalesced into a single convulsive roar that rocked the plant like the crack of doom. Elias, who was 150 yards away, could feel the ground and the six-story-high gun tower shake beneath his feet.

  All the while the FGM-148 Javelin TOW missiles with their double warheads and the Krakatoa charges continued to thunder in the storage shed, which housed the aboveground spent fuel storage pools. Almost directly in front of him, less than 250 feet away, he could see that Hamzi’s men had also fired the final rounds of shaped charges into the dry-cask storage silos. When the dense, fog-like haze in front of those silos cleared, Elias could see through his binoculars that the dry-cask storage silos were ripped open with cavernous craters, their fuel assemblies grotesquely exposed, filling up with smoke and flames.

  Now Klaxons were whooping through the plant, and in the far distance, maybe a half mile away, sirens of the National Guard and state police screamed as they raced toward the plant.

  Meanwhile, overhead fire extinguishers were spraying and hosing down the interior of the plant’s various buildings. At the same time, the colossal H2O tanks—both overhead and at ground level—were deluging the grounds, computers, heavy equipment and work areas with tens of millions of gallons of water.

  Elias stared out over the destruction in awe. Against his will, he had to drag himself away from the spectacle and back into his tower room. There, he picked his Barrett M82 up off the blanket-covered storage bin and rested the barrel on his shoulder. Exiting the tower room, he rounded the catwalk till he faced the incoming choppers, APCs, and cop cars approaching the crossroads on Highway 12. Kneeling down, he rested the barrel of his M82 in one of the notches he’d carved in the steel railing two hours before. The vehicles would have to slow down when they reached that ninety-degree turn at the intersection 237 yards up the road. He’d measured that distance on his car’s odometer, and he had sighted in his Leupold Mark 4 Scope at that range. Its ten-round box magazine was filled with Raufoss Mk 211 Mod 0 rounds, his favorite brand of armor-piercing incendiary ammunition (API). He’d be ready for them when they slowed at that junction.

  Then he saw a news chopper sweeping over the tree line maybe three-fourths of a mile away. He smiled to himself. He had no problem with a little publicity. If he was going to die tonight, why not go out in a blaze of televised glory?

  He went into the tower room and turned on the two-way radio. He adjusted the frequency until he got the news chopper.

  “Hi guys,” he said cheerfully, waving at them. “Welcome to hell.”

  “This isn’t the gun tower, is it?” a woman’s voice shouted, incredulous.

  He could see her in the chopper, studying him through a pair of binoculars. She had obviously seen him waving, and she was now waving back at him.

  “Sure is, but don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. Promise. It’s lonely up here, and I’d love the company. Also my superiors would love the PR. Get those cameras rolling. Focus on the smoking building and spent fuel silos. This whole place is going up in flames.”

  Then he lifted the liter bottle of Wild Turkey 101, held it up to the chopper in toast, and said, “Here’s looking at you, kids.” Taking a long hard chug from its neck, he bellowed into the two-way at the top of his lungs: “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!”

  PART XX

  Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.… For thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

  —Revelation 18:1–24

  1

  He was going to teach them all a painful lesson in nuclear humility.

  Hasad stood on the eastern side of his hotel suite in Washington, D.C.’s premier hotel, the Capitol Needle. A soaring needle tower, with a square base ninety-six feet on edge and ninety-six stories high, it was sometimes known as Needle 96 and was far and away the tallest building in D.C. This, its George Washington suite, had a 360-degree view of D.C. and a 180-degree view of the Capitol Building.

  At the moment, Hasad stood staring through a high-powered Zhumell 20×80mm tripod binoculars at the most embarrassingly ostentatious limousine in the world. The Saudi Ambassador, S
haiq ibn Ishaq, the president’s family, and the group’s bodyguards had exited the limo a half hour earlier, and, Hasad estimated, should be entering the congressional chamber about now. Glancing at one of his dozen TV monitors, he saw they were already in the hall, entering the president’s box. The TV camera moved in for a close-up of the smiling, hand-waving ambassador, the photogenically smiling First Lady, and her two clearly bored kids.

  Hasad and the chauffeur had concealed an HEU bomb in the false bottom of the trunk. He had also installed a two-way remote radio detonator in the bomb’s triggering system. Setting it off would not be all that difficult. He glanced at the handheld detonator on the dining-room table. It looked like a black outsized TV remote with a six-inch antenna. All Hasad had to do to set the bomb off was press the red button. He did not even have to point it.

  To avoid accidental detonation, he’d programmed the trigger to release on receipt of his 5MHz SSB transmission—a frequency so seldom used as to be almost nonexistent. He’d also removed some of the extra-high explosive from in back of the “HEU bullet.” He didn’t want too big a blast—one that might topple the tower, in which he was now ensconced.…

  * * *

  He wondered what Elena would think of all this. In truth, he was sick of both America’s arrogant ignorance and the Mideast’s maddeningly moronic vendettas. He’d told her he despised them all and had long ago declared a pox on both their houses.

  Furthermore, he was still bitter after his last mission. His Pakistani handlers had withheld his final payment and had threatened him unless he agreed to execute this insanely dangerous mission, which he had never agreed to and for which he had never contracted.

  And, of course, they had foolishly stated they would kill him, too.

  They had finally crossed the line with him.

  As for America, it was a country of lunatics who capriciously invaded and destroyed Third World nations, then argued that they had to destroy them to save them. By the same demented illogic, they justified their eternal development of newer, wickeder weapons of thermonuclear destruction, saying they needed them to save the “Free World.”

  Before it was over, he had told Elena, he was going to teach them all a painful lesson in nuclear humility. Afterward, he would grab his tens of millions of dollars in offshore, tax-free, black-hole accounts and go to ground—his blood-ground—pulling the hole in after him.

  In his final e-mail to Elena, he had told her that her career would be shot when he was finished and that he wanted her to come with him. She could bring Jules, too. Hell, Jules was like a sister to him. But Elena had to make up her mind then and there. He said when he was gone, he was gone. No one would ever find him. Elvis would finally leave the building. Forever.

  She had to send him a note, though, a signal, and he would arrange to meet her. She could stay with him and live a life of peace and luxury. They would have everything they had dreamed of back in college two decades ago, and most of all he would have the woman he’d torched it for all those years.

  The only person he’d ever loved.

  But she never got back to him.

  * * *

  The pounding on the door snapped him out of his reverie.

  What the fuck was that?

  Ignoring the commotion, he turned back to the street below. The cars were like a parking lot down there, as if locked in concrete. Shaiq’s limo was hopelessly quagmired on East Capitol Street right across from the Capitol Building entrance. Moreover, its two deflated tires and raised hood guaranteed it would be on that spot for some time to come. Hasad had plenty of time to incinerate everyone in the Capitol Building. The president was still at the rostrum, blathering away. One of Hasad’s ten TV monitors showed the congressmen, senators, and now the Saudi ambassador and First Family hanging breathlessly on his every word.

  The hammering in the hallway was now aggravating and unrelenting, so he went to the door and looked through the peephole. All he saw was a thumb.

  Fuck it.

  He grabbed a Colt Mark IV .45 automatic from under his belt in the small of his back. Holding the gun slightly behind his right leg, he opened the door. To his never-ending surprise, he was staring at Elena herself, bigger than life, in a black leather jacket and pants, a matching motorcycle helmet in the crook of her left arm, her hair short and platinum-bleached, a witches’ coven’s worth of crow-black makeup encircling her eyes, and big Super Dark Black Gascan wraparound biker shades atop her head.

  And a smile like the end of the rainbow.

  “Hey there, sailor,” she said, “long time no fuck.”

  2

  “I’M GIVING YOU THE STORY OF A LIFETIME!”

  —Elias Edito

  Jules was up in the news chopper with Sandy at the controls, attempting to interview Elias over her radio and broadcast his comments live over the MTN global cable TV network.

  “Can you tell us who you are and why you’re attempting to melt down the HRNPS?”

  “My name is Elias, and we aren’t attempting anything. We are melting it the fuck down.”

  “What’s your role in this, Elias?” Jules asked.

  He walked out onto the catwalk to answer her. “See those two dozen dead guards down there—their bodies strewn all over the plant grounds? That’s why I’m here.”

  “How were you able to get into the tower?” Jules asked.

  “How do you think I did it—levitation? I climbed up. I’ve worked here for fifteen years.”

  “Elias, you’ve killed an awful lot of people today. Don’t you think it’s time to quit?”

  Shit. He was upending the big whiskey bottle again.

  “Hell, no! Those two dozen men down there are nothing. I was a Marine Corps sniper for old Uncle Sam. Chris Kyle’s got nothing on me! In Iraq and Afghanistan, I shot the living shit out of over three hundred hajjis. I killed everything that walked, ran, or crawled—men, women, children, dogs, goats, cats, rats, eight to eighty, blind, crippled, or crazy, long as they didn’t fly or have webbed feet.”

  After taking another gigantic chug out of the whiskey bottle’s neck, he washed it down with a half-quart can of what looked to be Colt 45.

  His explosive laughter shook her headset like a level-9 earthquake.

  “But why kill these people here?” Jules asked.

  “’Cause I hate nuclear power?” His derisive laughter echoed through the night.

  “Apparently, all the murder and mayhem and the talk about Iraq’s unhinged him,” Sandy whispered to Jules, her hand over her mike.

  “Maybe this interview isn’t such a good idea,” Jules whispered back.

  “That’s about as plain as the balls on a tall dog,” Sandy whispered back.

  But now Jules couldn’t shut him up.

  “See all the flames and the smoke? My friends down there have blown up and incinerated every piece of radioactive shit that will burn.”

  “But you’ve done that,” Jules said. “Why not stop now? You could end it all here.”

  “There’s no fun in that! Anyway, what’s the point of having a skill if you don’t use it? The goddamn U.S. Marine Corps taught me how to shoot. Now it’s time to pay the piper, and I’m going to pipe our country a tune it’ll never forget. I’m going to pipe it right up America the Beautiful’s beautiful fucking ass. And I don’t mean by shooting a bunch of diaper-headed … dune coons. I’m going to shoot me some … righteously white Americans. How do you like it so far, ladies?”

  Again his idiot laughter ululated in their headsets.

  “Elias,” Jules said softly, placatingly, still hoping to calm him down, “remember we’re on international television. People all over the world, children included, are tuning in.”

  “So?”

  “You could watch the … obscenities a bit.”

  “Are you shitting me?” he whooped into her headset, roaring with rage like a gored water buffalo. “Five seconds in the minds of our Washington elite—and all those other brain-damaged, bed-wetting bastards,
who sent me over there—are fouler than all the filthy language ever spoken or written since Homer and Gilgamesh, paintings, carvings, and monument inscriptions included.”

  “But you made your point. Do you really intend to—”

  “We aren’t intending to do anything. See all that smoke and fire down there? My friends have set aflame some of the most poisonous crap on earth. That shit is instantly, everlastingly, intergalactically toxic, and those men are standing right next to it. What do you think they intend to do?”

  “Well maybe they intend to—”

  “Are you a complete idiot?” His insane laughter exploded in her ears like a volcanic eruption. “What do they intend to do? They intend to fucking … DIE!!”

  “Elias,” Jules said, her voice genuinely sad, “that’s just awful.”

  “Yeah, but look on the bright side, girls.”

  “What possible bright side could all this death and destruction have?” Jules asked.

  “I’M GIVING YOU THE STORY OF A LIFETIME!”

  Again, his hilarious howls rang through the night.

  Actually, Jules had to admit, he was right. He was giving them the story of a hundred lifetimes. He even began adding background music to go with it as Sister Cassandra and her band, the End Time, began to blare.…

  Elias was pumping her music up into their radio, full volume, through the plant’s loudspeaker system, and Sandy, in turn, was now broadcasting it globally over MTN, the world’s largest news network. The Good Sister’s signature anthem, “Rockin’ the Apocalypse,” was blasting into Jules’s headset and on TV sets everywhere even as Sandy televised the fiery inferno that was now the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station.

  When the deal goes down,

  And you’re lookin’ to score.

  When the shit hits the fan,